Fun with Watercolor + Simon Says Stamp New Beginnings Release

Hey everyone! Did you know that Simon Says Stamp has revealed their latest release New Beginnings?? It is full of Spring themed goodies (along with a few other things!), and I thought it would be fun to play around with my Zig markers and create a few cards!

This first card features one of the new Suzy’s Watercolor Cards. They are A2 sized illustrations printed onto a single sheet of watercolor paper. I used a few yellow, pink, green and blue markers to color in the images. I mixed colors at times to get different colors such as purple and peach.

I really love the new Handlettered Encouragement sentiment set. I stamped the “tomorrow is a new day” sentiment with Doll Pink ink and fussy cut it out before popping it up off of the card.

The card is created from white cardstock (cut to an A2 size), and I had die cut the watercolor card with a Simon’s Stitched Rectangle die.

I enjoyed watercoloring the coloring cards so much, I decided to do another one! These watercolor cards are really fun to take on the go or just color as a relaxing activity at the end of the day.

I used the same colors I had used on the previous card. After coloring I sprayed the entire piece with some Shimmer Spritz; because I had used Zig Clean Color markers to color the flowers, they reacted with the markers and created some fun water spots.

For the sentiment I used one of my favorites from a previous Simon release; the Painted Friend die. I cut it with some teal cardstock four times, stacked them together with adhesive and covered the entire sentiment with Spectrum Noir glitter.

Both of these two cards turned out so fun and I love how bright and happy they are! One more card for the day…

This next card was a fun experiment! I created an underpainting first… usually an underpainting is subtle layer of color in which the rest of the painting is layered over top of. But I love bright, bold color and I wanted to see what would happen if I used stronger colors.

I started off by taking a blank piece of watercolor paper; using similar colors as I did for the previous cards, I created a messy background. Once the background was created and dry, I prepped the paper for heat embossing.

The pretty flowers are from the More Spring Flowers stamp set. I white heat embossed them before watercoloring all the images with the same Zig markers I used in the background. For the sentiment, I again used the Handlettered Encouragement set; this time I gold heat embossed “be yourself” onto the watercolor panel.

One more thing to share! There is an adorable stamp set called Funny Food; it features a variety of food characters with cute smiles! I haven’t made any cards with them yet, but I thought I would share the progress of my project with you for something a bit different!

I’ve colored them with Zig Clean Color markers, this time using a different palette of colors. After coloring them, I fussy cut everything out. I do have the coordinating dies, but at the time I was coloring these, I was away from my studio. I enjoy fussy cutting; my favorite scissors to use for fussy cutting watercolor paper are the Tim Holtz Snip scissors. They cut through the thicker watercolor perfectly! Here are a few close up images to see of the images…

SOMETHING EXCITING!

I’m really excited to share that I have two new stamp sets that I designed in this month’s release for Simon Says Stamp! I created the Some Bunny Special and Friends of Life stamp sets.

I wait the anticipation while waiting for Nina-Marie’s page to load that there will be wonderful colors on her designs! Checking out her SSS blog cards was exciting! I adore her “messy” water color background! Eye candy:)